Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Fysx writes with recent comments from Valve co-founder Gabe Newell about how he thinks the traditional video game business model is flawed:
"The industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone. That’s actually a bug, and it’s something that we want to solve through our philosophy of how we create entertainment products. What you really want to do is create the optimal pricing service for each customer and see what’s best for them. We need to give customers, all of them, a robust set of options regarding how they pay for their content. An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with. Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave. We should have a way of capturing that. We should have a way of rewarding the people who are good for our community."

Steam is the program/service used for a large portion of digital distribution of games on Windows, and now Mac OSX.
Valve Software's major claim to fame before creating Steam is the Half - Life series of video games, which broke a lot of new ground in the FPS genre.
Gabe Newell is the founder of Valve, and comes from an old school Microsoft background, having been one of the primary coders on early versions of Windows.

So don't buy their games. I stopped buying anything from them when they introduced Steam, and wrote to Gabe explaining why. I got a very polite response, basically saying that they knew that they would piss off a lot of customers, but they'd make a lot more happy, and that he was sorry that I was in the former category. Valve's happy with their customers, and I'm happy not being one of their customers.

But despite all Valve's ideas, they still take about 5 times as long to release a game as their competitors, and whilst they're games are good, they're not so good that the increase in release time can be justified.

The thing is that Valve games have polish. Its not just about how much content is in there, but how smoothly everything fits together. Portal 2, at least in single player, is an exceptionally well done game: zero-glitch high-immersion with voice acting and model animations that are top-notch.

The games are not only 'good', but are 'high quality' too. What other game house can say that?

Tell people how low your price can possibly go, but have a plan to charge many times that amount. Good players can receive countless discounts, trolls and griefers would be well advised to take their bile elsewhere if they want to continue qualifying for said discounts.

Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave.

In other words, now, instead of having a bunch of friends harass you because they want to build a bigger farm, your friends will actually get monetary recompense for harassing you. Looks like I'll have to unfriend even more 'friends'

Trying to make money from something that isn't scarce is silly. Charge for the scarce goods not the stuff you can easily copy. The very first copy is scarce. Support is scarce. Commissioning people with talent is scarce.

They are TRYING to charge you for their time and talent, which is not scarce. As a bonus, you get a game. The way they do this, is by attatching an arbitrary value to what they CAN GIVE YOU - a game - but you are actually paying for the time and talent it took to create that game, not the copy of the game. Same with music, same with books, etc., etc.. If you can come up with a business model that lets people give out something that is infinitely reproduceable - AFTER it is produced, and get paid for the non-scarce talent/time investment... well, I'd like to hear it. I'm not convinced the current model is overly broken, merely that the the value of the public domain is undervalued in the current regulatory regime, and that many people don't look beyond the thing they can acquire to see if something pre-final product was actually scarce.

If you can come up with a business model that lets people give out something that is infinitely reproduceable - AFTER it is produced, and get paid for the non-scarce talent/time investment... well, I'd like to hear it.

Well, I don't currently have a business model like this that I can show you, but if you pay me a bit of money, I'll design one for you -- We can share the plan with everyone once I'm done.

1) Why limit yourself to models that pay for something AFTER it has been produced?

We have centuries of experience with paying BEFORE for people to produce something and that seems to have worked out ok (Michelangelo didn't exactly paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for free and sold tickets AFTER)

2) There are in fact successful comercial models that include free distribution of the copyrighted product. For example, Redhat makes is money from support. Similarly, some game makers distribute the game for free and make their money solely from paid subscription to access a managed online environment for that game.

3) In computer systems DRM is more than just a means of protecting copyright. It is essentially an automated digital Agent for the seller which is present in the sold product and imposes arbitrary after-sale limitations on the use of it. With online authorization and updating, the seller can even easilly and at no cost change the allowed use of the product AFTER the buyer has paid for it and the only recourse for the buyer is (costly) legal action to recover access to those features they already paid for.

A good real-life example of how DRM is used by the seller to change after-sale features of a product is the "Removal of Linux access on the PS3" situation.

To use a car analogy, it's like buying a car and discovering that you have a representative of the brand on board always with you when you drive. He can stop you doing certain things (say, turning the radio on, opening the windows or having passengers on the back-seats) and will, once in a while, phone home office and get a new list of limitations he will impose. He works for free and if he suddenly adds a new limit on your use of the car you bought (say, by only allowing the aircon to be off or full-blast on) you have to go to court with it and show that the contract you signed when you bought the car actually included the right to use that function of the car which you've just been denied the use of (i.e. that the contract actually stated you could regulate the level of the aircon).

With Physical Property like a car, the law is in your side in that you can just kick the seller's agent out of your car.

However, with Intellectual Property laws in places like the US you actually have no easy way to do that since:- AFTER the sale you have to accept the EULA to use the product you just bought, which in some States as per-law means you just signed a contract that pretty much gives the Seller any arbitrary rights they want.- Laws like DCMA restrict your access to tools that would allow removing of seller's digital Agent(s) from a product you bought.

Current Intellectual Property laws de facto support the right of the seller to arbitrarilly enforce and change at will limitations on a product that the buyer has already bought, something which, with products which are purelly physical, is not allowed.

This is why Intellectual Property when it comes to products which can contain digital Agents is flawed.

Yeah, everyone and his brother wants to "segment the market", to charge widely different prices for the same thing based on the variable amount of utility (Econ 101 jargon for "yeah, what's it worth to you, Bud") for the different customers.

The phone company had that time-of-day pricing (good that is gone -- Hi Mom, sorry it is 2 AM by you but it is 11 PM for me here in college, and um, I need some money). GM would slap a Buick badge on a Chevy, Ford a Lincoln badge on a Ford and charge money for the sta

Trying to make money from something that isn't scarce is silly. Charge for the scarce goods not the stuff you can easily copy. The very first copy is scarce. Support is scarce. Commissioning people with talent is scarce.

I thought bottled water in places where clean water is plentiful for almost nothing would never take off. I was wrong. People aren't rational.

"Unless you're post-filtering the water coming from the tap, it's got all sorts of stuff still in the water that can be objectionable, harmful over time, etc."

Numerous studies have found that city tap water generally safer, cleaner, has less bacteria, tastes better in blind taste tests, etc. than bottled water. The bottled water industry has numerous "bacterial and chemical contamination problems" per the NRDC.

What started as the Team Fortress 2 nonsense store which allowed the purchasing of hats in a first person shooter(!), has progressed to a total overhaul of how Valve sell their products. Portal 2 is now fast becoming the flagship example, with, wiat for it, hats available for purchase, along with little flags and such. DLC (I feel a bit sick every time I say or type that) is the devil that you cant' avoid. If Activision put a human shit in a box and sold it as Call of Duty (or Modern Warfare, whichever they

I feel like we are still in the infancy of all of this and many companies are going to make the mistake that some of their previous successes in DLC are "how business is done" and it just becomes another checkbox on the game development list that becomes exploited in a more miserly fashion with each new iteration. Thankfully there have been huge blunders (horse armor) that pointed companies in better directions. So I'm not too worried on that one.

Which had NO EFFECT ON GAMEPLAY. Bad "day 1 DLC" (in the eyes of people who whine about that shit, honestly I think it's fine) is DLC that's like a set of 5 multiplayer maps when the game only shipped with 5 to begin with, or a single player mission that gives a bunch of goodies that makes the game easier, or when an NPC runs up to you and asks you to save his family and when you agree a dialog comes up to enter your credit card information to help him. The logical complaint is that these are pieces of game

I initially wrote this off as "oh he's sort of trying to implement perfect price discrimination", which is great in theory, impossible in practice.

But if you ignore his "one price for everyone is a bug" idea, which is fucking stupid. Then supplant it with a, you get micro payments over time, to your account, for playing a lot and being a good player. Then it's just "incentivise people to play nice". That would mean some sort of mechanism of ranking players (based on fun), and giving them targeted discounts based on new games.

This seems fine and dandy... in theory. Once again, how would such a mechanism be implemented? Admin's would suddenly have a lot of power, or other players would, where they could actually do monetary damage to someone. You'd need a dispute resolution system, which is going to cost you overhead. Suddenly you've invented an elaborate system, which might make less profit, and the inventive structure might deter people from getting into these games because "well if I'm not good at it, I might end up paying more for other games I'm more interested in/better at".

At which point, you realize BOTH of these ideas, and likely everything this man has ever said, everything his grandparents ever said, and that his spawn will ever say, is wrong!

Micropayments would work well for this, a flat monthly charge would too slow to keep up with the dynamics. If you focus on incentivising good behaviour, not so much punishing bad behaviour, people will work it out for themselves. Mind you someone who plays a lot is actually costing the company more, so bulk discounts are kind of self defeating. So yeah I can't see much use for this idea.

But if you ignore his "one price for everyone is a bug" idea, which is fucking stupid.

Micropayments have already proven to be a good way to get price discrimination. For example, check out what happened to Dungeons&Dragons Online after it went free-to-play with ability to buy extra content or eye candy. By giving customers a lot of payment strategies to choose from they managed to get a huge revenue increase. Here's a first link I googled out for you: Going Free Boosts Turbine's DDO Revenues 500 Percen [gamasutra.com]

Sorry. I made the fatal mistake of RTFA, and just Re-RTFA just in case I missed it, and I still don't see it. Nowhere is he talking about micro-payments for extra content or eye candy. Also, this isn't "a lot of payment strategies" your examples are "different products". There is a HUGE difference.

I have no problem with these different products, such as paying for eye candy (like more hats in TF2!), or paying for DLC. No problem there, and this isn't what he's talking about. Also, this isn't price discrimination. You could loosely apply third degree price discrimination [wikipedia.org], but this would be more like "You bought a more expensive variant of the game and it comes with a golden hat, which can't be purchased later".

What he's talking about, is proper price discrimination, and he offers these two examples:

"charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with"

" how much people want to pay for items. Some people are happy paying a dollar. They’ll pay a dollar over and over and over again, others want to be different, others want to run servers and create mods. Each one of these people should represent a different monetisation scheme for the community as a whole."

While the latter is a possibility and they're already doing this (such as "free to play this weekend", "DLC", "WoW pricing model", etc), the former, is what everyone is discussing.

Okay, so your per game rating means they can't apply discounts beforehand, additionally it's open to the biggest weakness of "how do we rate 'fun'". Do you know an easy way to calculate this? A way which isn't open to gaming? A way where you don't give the trolls a very nice weapon? A way where the administration overhead doesn't increase disproportionately? A way which allows you to trust servers that you don't run?

Quite frankly, you're saying I have an "inability to see it implemented", where as you've got what I like to call entrepreneurs myopia, it's like marketing myopia [wikipedia.org] but it's where you don't think through the entire solution, systematically, and instead jump to simplistic solutions which don't necessarily reflect reality. We all get it, especially entrepreneurial types (Read: ADD/Bipolar types).

Also, this sort of analysis is what I do. Implementing different revenue models, is extremely difficult, and requires looking at each stakeholder (particularly the ones which are customers or associated in that way), then considering how they make their buying decision, considering what all the incentives produced are, what sort of proportions these would be produced in, and what the sum of these two would be. You're bound to get a lot of this wrong, because incentives aren't obvious, until a lot later. The dotcom boom was a perfect example of this, many different revenue models which on the surface seemed good, but underneath was a house of cards. Though hopefully we likely wouldn't make the valuation feedback mistake again (Well, at least as obviously).

"Brainstorming" I've found to be useless, you just get a pile of ideas (which are never in shortage), instead of rigorous analysis. Which is what's actually required!

Anyway, I sort of went off on a few tangents here, it's hard to stay on track when discussing such complicated ideas, in essentially an open forum (and they are complicated ideas, when you look at them in full).

Actually "loosers" will not be told they are such for exactly the reasons you state. However the incentive to make games more fun will bring in larger audience (because people play to have fun first and foremost). So you give some discounts to "fun to play with" players and you get this money back thanks to the increased revenue. You win, your customers win - this is how you do business.

I don't come from a country with that model, ours is a merit based system, where everyone pays the same (though some programs/courses cost more), and people are divided by their entry method(s) score. Though local students (defined as being from that country) pay a discounted amount, and receive government funding, where as international students pay the full price.

Having a quick read over this, I'd suggest it's nowhere near perfect price discrimination, unless each (or at least, relatively small groups) of

So lemme get this straight, Mister Newell: you wanna charge socially awkward and inept people, like loners and people with Asperger's Syndrome, a premium simply because they don't benefit your Bottom Line above and beyond what they pay for the game? You want to penalize them for being "unpopular"?

Wow, as if they didn't get enough of that mistreatment in high school, now they have to endure it in the marketplace.

Victim complex much? He wants to charge more to the trolls and hackers. The sort of people that join a server and blare Rick Astley through voice chat nonstop. That's not going after the loners, that's going after the assholes.

Get out of Mom's basement much? He effectively wants to penalize anyone who doesn't positively effect the social aspect of a game (and thus indirectly benefit Valve)... in other words, socially impaired people, not just "trolls" and "hackers". Newell never used those terms, you did. You don't seem to have a very useful definition of "socially impaired". Newell used a brush about as wide as "socially impaired", not as fine as "troll" or "hacker". There are plenty of ways a person can cause people to shu

You find that people in online games quit for all sorts of bad reasons, including "That guy is better than me." I've seen that kind of thing in Bad Company 2, servers that get cleared out because people are good and nobody likes losing all the time.

I play BC2 with a small group of friends, all who are pretty good at it. We are all above average. Get a couple of us together on a server, and we tend to slant things to the side we are on. This often leads to lots of people leaving on the other side. Sometimes it leads to a server dying because people leave, the server switches people from our team, they don't wan to be on the other side so they leave and so on.

Even happens when we are facing another group who is playing together. That is most often the sort of game we get in, since that is where there are a lot of spots on one side. We'll get in and a group of people in the same clan are on the other side. We'll turn the tide of the battle and start winning, and they'll all leave because they want to beat up on people.

So should we get ranked down and charged more because we are good at the game? Now I should add we don't talk shit, we don't harass people, we just play the game to win. People leave because they like to win and aren't having fun losing. Should we get penalized for playing the game, as intended, and being good just because others are not as good and do not care to play against us?

Specifically, the Hindenberg of an experiment where they coded the costs of weapons and equipment to shift based on their cross-server popularity.

The experiment broke down immediately. Prices skewed so high on some weapons that they were literally unattainable. People coded and loaded servers full of bots to do nothing but buy weapons and further fuck with the algorithm. People figured out how to turn it off and voted with their feet.

The funniest thing about this whole 'give bennies to 'good' players' thing

How did wearing the halo become a "tool in the griefer arsenal"? A few servers banned people who didn't wear them, but a) that's because those people were likely cheaters and b) who cares about being banned from a couple servers when there are thousands?

Valve does Gods work imho so I would not dismiss this out of turn. He is naturally talking about multiplayer games because in single player games you effectively pay for the content so your entire user experience is crafted by the company using artists etc so in that case you charge what it cost you to make and think up and then some. Now in multiplayer games, the community adds a significant portion of the value to the final product so it could be argued that it makes sense that they be rewarded for adding value to a product (not unlike modders who can sell their maps on the starcraft 2 map store thingie).

In an MMORPG you ARE rewarded for being a better community member when you join groups, raids etc allowing you to unlock better gear and levelup faster. This does not result in monetary gain but most mmo's have some kind of conversion between in game benefits and real world money (not gold farmers, more like purchasable experience scrolls and the like). So in some ways being a better community player already rewards you (at least in theory, by design). Should the base game be cheaper for better community members? I dont think so. Should being a team player/community positive give you in game rewards that are otherwise purchasable with RL cash? Yea that sounds decent.

Its vvvvvvvery interesting he mentions Dota 2 here. First because its good to hear some news about it cos I am waiting on it, and secondly because DotA (the original wc3) has a community that WILL bite your head off the instant you make a mistake in game or say something stupid in people. For some reason DotA brings out the worst in people.

I dont care about online MP these days, but if this even so much as creeps near Valve's single player titles they can fuck off, i like my games single player and without influence from random internet people thank you very much, that includes the price

Gabe, Gabe, Gabe. You love talking about this hypothetical shit, but you somehow can't bring yourself to answer even the smallest questions people ask about Episode 3 (or Half Life 3 if you believe the rumors).

Shut the fuck up and get your developers coding already. You can't end Episode 2 like that and not have a resolution.

Yes I'm pissed off. Maybe irrationally, but this guy's been spouting a lot of crap recently (how games need to be more social, connected to Facebook and so on) that I'm wishing for some

I totally agree with Gabe on game pricing, when the pricing we are talking about is how much the gamer pays, with the price varying based on the market they reside in. For example, a gamer in China or a developing nation should be able to pay less for a game than someone from EU or the USA. The average salary in emerging markets does not allow for paying the same price as we do in the EU or USA (or Korea, Japan, etc.). I believe this is a major driving factor behind game and software piracy in these countri

Yes, the fact that you are on a flight from O'Hare to SFO and paid $234 while the person ahead of you paid $428 and the person beside you paid $173...yeah, people will loooove that model brought to Steam.

Valve/Steam is already implementing a "one price per region and currency" approach : the number is the same for people paying in Euros and Dollars, just the currency changes, which means quite a difference in the actual price you pay, eg. Portal2, 49.99$ vs 49.99 euros (~70 US$ according to xe). I guess we europeans are not fun enough to play with.

This is where I have a real problem with the 21st century version of capitalism.

Through peer pressure & succumbing to advertising, too many consumers have lost their minds & backbones these days - I actually think it is quite a "sick" society we have when people are prepared to queue overnight for a new gadget or game, especially when in other parts of the world people queue for food in order to avoid starvation.

I don't have a problem with wealth, I don't do so badly myself, but it's clear that in t

I am willing to pay but only if you dont harass me with complicated schemes on signing up/getting rebates etc. If you want that people advertise for you, then hire them. If you want that people spread the word about your game on Facebook or at other places, then make a good game.

Stop trying to pay susceptible people off for the possibility to influence their reviews.

Something you may be aware of is the increase in popularity in gaming over the past several decades.That translates into more households with more than one gamer, and more households with more than one gaming generation.I game, my kids game, I have many friends whose partner games.

As an individual steam user, I find your prices generally reasonable, your service adds enough value (ignoring ethics and judging strictly from a convenience perspective) to justify paying you and using it over the hassles of both piracy and retail. Good job to you and your team on getting (me) there.

However, I, like many geeks of my generation, have now evolved into a family of five, and am no longer an individual steam user.

This is where the problems start, and you push me, your customer, away. Why? Because I'm a dad, and my gang all play.

For the sake of making a point, I will ignore 'offline mode' because the games we care about are online.

Here are the options you give me:

Option 1. Have one steam account per person, and either buy many copies of each title(or, I am told, go through a cumbersome process that costs 10$ processing fee to have your support move the title between accounts, this option is too painful to be practical. ).

Insisting I have a separate per-game license for each kid makes sense and is fair if we will be playing concurrently (and it is A-OK for you to sell us a 'borderlands 4-pack'. I'll buy it.).This makes no sense if I'm done playing a game, uninstall it, and my kid wants to have a go. Realistically, you're dreaming if you think you'll get me to pay twice. You'll either give me a way to let my kid use it, or I'll take my business elsewhere to GOG or direct2drive or retail, because they will.

Option 2. Have one account for what I'll tell you is/me/, but what in reality will be the whole family. I won't tell, you won't know. Sadly, that means that two computers on my home network can't be "on steam" at the same time, and I can't play online game X while my kid plays online game Y. Plus, it'll get all my steam achievements gunked up with my kid's ones. I don't want that. Force me down this route and, again, I'll go.

Option 3. I'll create a separate steam account for every game I purchase. This will make your product into a very inconvenient one with a flaky user experience, no achievement history etc, and I'll take my business elsewhere. Too much hassle.

Here's the news. An entire gaming generation is now very busy having their children reach gaming age.

You can put some weight behind those brave words you said. The solution is dead obvious.

The recipe is:1. One family "billing account" (that's a BILLING account, not an application account you sign into steam with) with a single billing method. If a single billing method isn't enough to deter most of the unrelated people from pooling into a "pretend family" account and costing you potential revenue (it probably would be enough, and while you may lose a bit of immediate revenue, you will make huge gains in customer loyalty by trusting them), then put your thinking cap on and figure out how to structure a plan to include real families that count money together and exclude most of the freeloaders. You have smart people working for you.2. ONE family-wide game/license library.3. Several "gamer" steam accounts, one per real person managed by the billing contact (the guy with the credit card who vets the games, aka the parent), without needing to involve you. That's what web interfaces (or your application) are for. These steam accounts should all be able to go online concurrently, and can all have their own (SEPARATE) steam achievements, and can be use different games at the same time. If they want multiple people to be playing the same game at the same time (that thing we call co-op play is very popular in families btw) they need to purchase and own multiple licenses. Keep 2-pack, 3-pack and 4-pack deals coming.Yes, this will mean you may have sev

I agree with all your criticisms. They're the reasons why if I have a choice between a steam only game and an xbox version of that game I'll get the xbox version so my wife and I can have separated achievements, progress, saves (in some cases), friends etc.

Your solution is a great one too. I'd love it if Valve introduced something like that.

Rather than posting this on Slashdot, why not email Gabe Newell directly? Your argument is sound. Might as well present it to the one person that this kind of information will have an impact on. He is very well known for responding to all his emails eventually.

Gabe if you are listening - I am transferring as much business as I can from Steam to Amazon for this very reason. Their flexibility means they are offering a better product. I couldn't care less about friends lists, or achievements, or any of the rest of that crap. I want to be able to LEGALLY play my games without screwing with CDs, or logging in and out of a Steam account because my kid wants to play a game attached to my account. Until you fix this, I'm taking my business elsewhere.

Yes, because the object of the game will cease to be capturing the dragons or whatever, and become trying to get the cheapest price/most cash refunded. This will usually involve doing things that aren't particularly useful to others but which it is possible to fool the system into thinking you are a 'fun guy to play with'.

This is basically what happened on/. with karma- for some people the object stopped being an interesting conversation and became karma whoring to increase their score.

I wonder how this will affect all my single player games. Treat the NPCs well, and I get a discoount?

Valve would do well to remember that while the online games can be cash cows, they are also more risky and carry a much larger operating expense. It's the single player games that provide the slow secure income that allows you to do the social gaming. Reward those users, because they won't require additional expenses on your part after buying their games, and won't fill up your tech support with questions on port forwardings and complaints about latency.

It's the single player games that provide the slow secure income that allows you to do the social gaming. Reward those users, because they won't require additional expenses on your part after buying their games, and won't fill up your tech support with questions on port forwardings and complaints about latency.

They also don't pay anything after making their purchase. To be totally honest I don't think single player games have much of a future at the moment, except maybe as a hobbyist pastime. Which is a terrible pity.

Yeah, it's a wonderful pipe dream. An MMO where the worst scum of the playerbase get charged extra until they shape up or screw off would be a beautiful idea.

Pity it'll never happen. Any system can be gamed and any person you might want to penalize is the sort of person who will figure out how to game it. Unless you can code the game to recognize and punish bad player behaviour without introducing loopholes, and I don't see that as terribly likely.

Though you could introduce a "swear jar" feature easily enough, whereby using certain words in general chat on most servers would net you a fine, Demolition Man style. At a minimum, making the scumbags pay out the nose for yelling the word "fag" like Fred Phelps with Tourette's syndrome would be a thing of beauty. And perhaps a teabaggers fee for the FPS genre.

Got invited back to EVE online recently. Every time I think about returning I do a little bit of math, and remind myself that anyone willing to spend even a small amount of real-world money could easily buy themselves enough in-game currency to replace a ship like mine three times over. I consider it one of the critical flaws in EVE. Other MMOs may have to tolerate a little exchange on the black market of in-game advantage for real-world cash, but EVE is happy to endorse it so long as they get the money.

One of the alliances in EVE - Red Something-Or-Other - is financed by a wealthy Russian dude. He basically just dropped $100,000 on PLEXes, CCP said "lol, okay", and he instantly crashed the PLEX market. You literally can buy your way into the game, and CCP is not remotely ashamed about it.

You can also play about 30 hours a month (once your skills are up) and make enough Isk to never have to pay for the game again. (Soloing Level 3s/4s, roughly 10 million an hour, and a PLEX is usually around 300,000,000 Is

For say an MMO you could have a "Like" and "Dislike" button, and have a limit of times you can use it per day. And you might only be able to use it on people who have been on your own team/side;). And you only see your score update after a week or so, or 30 dislikes/likes whichever comes first.

End of the month, the top X most liked might get a month's free play. The top Y most disliked might get monitored by staff (review interaction logs) to see if either they've been abusing T&C in ways that might ge

Why? How's that fair? If you were making an argument for education or healthcare, or anything else that benefits society through supporting you, then maybe. But not for commodities like game. It's discrimination at that point. If you can't afford games, find something else to do.

Agree? That's not what Gabe is suggesting at all. He's saying that griefers should have to pay more than the noobs they frag, as every ragequit represents lost revenue. Players who bring noobs into the game actually make money for Valve, so should be rewarded with steeper discounts. Interesting idea. But it's about game theory (heh), not MMO socialism.

I earn plenty, and yet I still seldom buy $50 to $90 games because they are rarely worth it.

Steam makes it very easy to follow the sales, buy reasonable games at $2 to $15 when they are on super specials, and leave them in your library until you are ready.

Even if they are great games, they will almost certainly be re-released in a "game of the year" variant at a fraction of the price, with fewer bugs, including all of the DLC's, and chances are by that time your hardware

Than the system you just described? Obviously. It's easy to design a system that's less fair. The challenge is to design one that's more fair. Just because you aren't up to the challenge doesn't mean it's a bad idea...

Having a reputation system that gets you in game/store credit, that you can never lose, could work. eg, help some noob through the training level (ala portal 2) gives you $0.50 credit to your next game / DLC purchase... But charging people for trolling/griefing? Not gonna happen. Charging people based on geographical area? Please no, publishers already suck too much at this.

By the way, with your idea I just thought of a perfect way to screw anybody new, who enters the game for the benefit of those, who've been stuck in it for a while. All noobs are all losers, didn't you know? It's fair and balanced.

Or, everybody pays the same price up front and the same monthly fee at first, and the people who get good ratings and few/no complaints quietly get their bill lowered as a reward. Kind of like the karma ad blocking on slashdot...

Cable companies could make more money if they could just become repositories for programming on demand for everything. So basically they become one giant PVR - and charge per episode or per season for programming - of course, advertisers would want them to force ads, but if I had enough money to start it up, id offer a full streaming on demand service - one subsidized by on screen ads while you were watching programmi

Valve released survivor mode, crash course and sacrifice for L4D, a lot of people were pissed off when L4D2 was announced so close to L4D1 but eventually everyone came around and valve kept its promise of releasing content for L4D. They even flew the community members who were leading the protest to their studio to playtest L4D2 and understand why it had to be a sequel and not an expansion.

All their DLC's are free for all platforms except where the platform owner (microsoft) insists they be paid. The only t

Depends on how they do it. I'd wager that most gamers would rate other gamers less on their body count and more on, "was that guy a total dick". If it goes this direction I'd see this as a plus because no one likes getting screamed at and told that their entire family should die in a fire 2 seconds after spawning. It would cause player retention to go up as well as getting rid of some pointless intimidation for new players. Hell, I would pay more just to have the jerks weeded out. If I'm wrong and most game

VAT is nowhere near 40%. Currency exchange margins never exceed 5%. And the american version isn't tax-free either.

In the USA advertised prices never include taxes. When I buy a $59.99 game I actually pay $59.99 * 1.08 = $64.78. That final price includes state and local taxes. There is no federal sales tax / VAT in the USA.

When you compare the "before tax" price in the USA to the Euro price minus VAT and then adjust for exchange rates the difference in cost isn't that large.